To Want
by Scribbler
Summary: [one shot] Short character sketch, post Season Three episode 'X23'. A weapon tries to come to terms with her unwanted humanity.


DISCLAIMER ~ I don't own XME. Tried, but was outbid. Boo.   
  
A/N ~ This ficlet was written as a response to Yma's Neglected Character Challenge. It is primarily a result of insomnia and a guilt that I rarely enter fanfic contests, despite numerous promises to the contrary. See original challenge here; http://www.internutter.org/bb/viewtopic.php?t=613   
  
Just a short character sketch - takes place just after X23, even though I've never seen the episode. I laugh in the face of scheduling and tweak the nose of continuity.  
  
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'To Want' By Scribbler  
  
January 2004  
  
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She stands in the rain because she can.   
  
She doesn't reflect how the moonlight shimmers on the water, turning each droplet into a shard of light. She doesn't watch the dashes of hail skipping through the downpour. She doesn't even acknowledge when a leaf, torn from its mooring, comes to rest with a slap against her cheek.  
  
She stands because she can; because she wants to.  
  
She has never experienced want before.  
  
Need, desire, doing that which is necessary – these things are familiar. She knows what it is to follow orders, to perform and return and perform again, meeting criteria and doing what's expected of her – all under constant scrutiny. She knows how to kill - to rip and rend and tear in ways more brutal than even the hardiest of soldiers do. These things she knows. These things she understands.  
  
She doesn't understand want. She doesn't know what it is *to* want.   
  
She barely understands freedom. It is a fluid, inconsistent thing that hums just below her consciousness. A part of her knows that she is meant to have it, but the upper regions of her brain just can't fully accept the concept. Those parts that might once have held rarefied thinking, intellectualism, are so far a part of the old brain, the mind humans inherited from reptiles, that they buck against sentience entirely. She is a wild thing, trying on the uncomfortable skin of humanity.  
  
But she isn't a machine. She isn't a killing device. She's more – she knows she's more. She's like them, the scientists, the prey, the other hunters – but not.   
  
Not prey. No. But sometimes yes. Yes.  
  
She sees the world in shades of prey and not prey. She knows where and who and what she is in relation to those boundaries. She is prey to some, hunter of others. The lines are fine and fragile, but she knows them. She *understands* them.  
  
Something so intricate, so complicated and refined she's known since the beginning, the start of her memories.  
  
Memory? What's that? Images, thoughts, past doings.  
  
Why is it, then, that she can't understand this… this want? This aspiration?   
  
She is a creature of the present. It's an integral facet of survivalism – live in the here and now, see what you see and what others see and don't look back. It's a way to live, to stay alive.  
  
Memory serves no purpose. Her body remembers what it needs to, freeing her mind to concentrate on weak points, open access, and termination.   
  
Not a killing machine. More. But… all she's ever known. Death and pain and hurt – a repeating loop, played over and over and over. She has no childhood, no soft recollections to temper the hurt. As far as she knows, everything *is* hurt. It will always *be* hurt, because that is the way of things. Animals know this. They've consented to it.  
  
Even meeting him, seeing him, fighting him, had all been hurt.   
  
He who is so much like her…  
  
The reptile brain understands family – procreation and immortality through descendants. It comprehends what it is to parent and to have a parent, even if that relation is defunct and no longer useful.   
  
She has left the nest already, but she never knew this parent; this one so much like herself.   
  
He had her claws. None of the other prey or hunters ever had her claws.   
  
What does this make him, then? Prey or hunter?  
  
Neither?  
  
But… what else is there?  
  
A crack in the mindset. A sliver of something, frail and tenuous, but budding nonetheless. There is more than the boundaries of the wild. This is something beyond that…  
  
Confusion.  
  
It rips through her, shrugging off the minor breakthrough and submerging it in rage at her own ineptitude.  
  
The rain pelts her skin, wet slaps to jolt her from her ruminations. She's never been lost to inner thought in such a way, before. The unending loop made sure she stayed true to what she'd been designed to do. This newness of autonomy, of choice, is overwhelming.   
  
She fears it.  
  
She knows fear, like every good hunter does. Fear and anger are primal – her rage is fear turned in on itself, and is as much a part of her as the metal of her bones. It's through civilisation that humanity first cultivated and maintained things like justice and love and loyalty. Civilisation is something she has never known, and so she knows nothing of these gentle things than what her brain is now trying to receive.  
  
She has grown her independence, just as the scientists grew her in a Petri dish. She was not born with it, if her beginnings can even be called a birth. She fought for it, nurtured it without knowing what she was doing, and finally, confronted by the parent that was not a parent, she set it free and claimed back the birthrights denied her all her life.   
  
Her brain doesn't want to accept them. She wants to understand what it is to be human – just to *be*, even – but her brain does not. She can learn language and behaviour, and maybe even love, but she will never really understand this want.   
  
In truth, she doesn't understand it enough even to know what it is the want is for.   
  
Freedom?  
  
Knowledge?  
  
Kin?  
  
The next piece of prey?  
  
Maybe what she wants are words to put her lack of understanding into. She knows some, but they're sketchy and few – picked up and gnawed on like an old bone.   
  
Does she want words? Does she need them? Will they help her understand this new life for which she's waged war upon her creators?   
  
Or will they further confuse things? Words are a product of civilisation, of humanity, and she skulks around that entire concept at best. There is no herd instinct within her – she is a lone wolf, a present danger, a clear-cut adversary of all things prey. Words were invented as a warning system against creatures like her that threatened the herd.   
  
She is alone, even from herself. She is fractured, broken, made up of too much and too many factors for the world to agree to. She is alone because she will never be properly understood. How can she, when *she* doesn't even understand herself?  
  
She has no name, no genus, no past, no future – nothing but the here and now. And even that she is struggling to come to terms with. All she truly has are six metal claws and a want for something… indefinable.   
  
She has a word. She doesn't know how she has this word, but it seems important, somehow. And so she says it, perhaps in some vain hope it will stir her writhing mind into coherence and allow her to step out of the rain.er."aeble.   
  
ng...t she is ishat she is is struggling to come to terms with. ned herd'ot a parent, she had set it free and cl  
  
"Father."  
  
She waits. And listens.   
  
Nothing.  
  
The word didn't help. The confusion and rage and fear are all still there.   
  
Perhaps they'll always be in her.  
  
Maybe that's what she really wants.  
  
She doesn't know.  
  
And so she stands in the rain, heedless of its beauty and the monsters pursuing her shadow. She stands and lets her hair be plastered against her skull; she lets her claws out and she howls at the night and the multifarious hunters and prey within it.   
  
And she does it because she can.   
  
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FINIS.  
  
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End file.
